Political stunts obscure efforts to improve lives
Establishment Democrats prefer to campaign on what Democrats will do for you, i.e., “kitchen tables issues” or the 20 votes mentioned on Saturday. MAGA Republicans (virtually the establishment) whip up their base over what Democrats will do to you. They have no affirmative legislative agenda. They don’t have to promise big-money backers what Republicans will do for the people who fund them. That’s understood and best unspoken.
The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy references colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells who noted that Republicans seem to be betting that they can win races across the country by putting a bellows to the heated culture wars. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have done it by shipping migrant children, women and men to blueish “sanctuary cities to “own the libs.” They used busses. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida shipped his victims to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas using small jets and his taxpayers’ money allocated dubiously for removing migrants from Florida:
The forty-four-year-old’s central insight, Wallace-Wells pointed out, is that the best way to unify a party of the right these days is to mercilessly attack educated progressives wherever they can be found: in politics, the media, education, business, or wherever. To DeSantis, at least, flying undocumented Venezuelans from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard fits this model neatly. In response to questions at an event in the Panhandle, he conceded that his action wasn’t really about the migrants, or the struggle of the border cities to take in larger numbers of them. It was about owning the libs. “All those people in D.C. and New York were beating their chest when Trump was President, saying they were so proud to be sanctuary jurisdictions,” he said. “The minute even a small fraction of what those border towns deal with every day is brought to their front door, they all of a sudden go berserk, and they’re so upset that this is happening. And it just shows you that their virtue signalling is a fraud.”
That the Vineyard berzerking never happened is no impediment to Republicans flogging their narrative. Liberals are poseurs is their story and they are sticking to it, observed Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation.
Mystal continued, “See, the MAGA brain works off the assumption that everybody is just as small minded and bigoted as they are, others just lack the guts to say it. They can’t conceive that most people are just not as crappy as they are, and so they’re always projecting their crappiness onto others.” Besides, DeSantis himself conceded that the point of these stunts “isn’t to *solve* a problem, it’s to make one.”
Politico considers whether the DeSantis stunt has backfired. Many constituents among the large immigrant community in South Florida have, like the Venezuelans DeSantis (I nearly mistyped “DeSatanis”) diverted have fled communist or socialist countries. Their governor just signalled MAGA Republicans really feel about them.
“They know this is absolutely toxic in Miami-Dade County because it’s showing their true colors,” said state Sen. Annette Taddeo. She is challenging incumbent Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R) in FL-27. “All this outrage about socialism and communism — it’s all fake.”
More such disgusting demagoguery is on tap from the GOP in 2024.
While Republicans are trying to cause problems, Pres. Joe Biden is trying to solve them. His cancer “moonshot” means to address a disease that not only took one of his sons, cancer afflicts not only “Democrats and Republicans, but all Americans.”
Ezra Klein considers Biden’s creating a DARPA for health care to do what the more cautious National Institutes of Health cannot:
Shortly after winning the presidency, Biden persuaded Congress to fund an analogue focused on medical technology: ARPA-H. Why do we need an ARPA-H when the National Institutes of Health already exists? Because the N.I.H., for all its rigor and marvels, is widely considered too cautious. ARPA-H will — in a move some lament — be housed at the Institutes, but its explicit mandate is to take the kind of gambles that Darpa takes, and the N.I.H. sometimes lets go. Wegrzyn, Biden promised, is “going to bring the legendary Darpa attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need.”
Here, two facets of the Biden administration reveal themselves, one of which I don’t think gets enough credit, the other which I worry doesn’t receive enough critique. The first is that the Biden administration has put technological advance at the very center of its agenda. Every big bill Biden has passed has carried a theory of how better policy could lead to better technologies that could lead to a better world. The second is that the Biden administration’s technological optimism is paired with an institutional conservatism: Too many Washington agencies proved too cautious during the pandemic, and little has been done to make them more daring.
Let’s start with Biden’s ambition. Four major bills have passed during his presidency: The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Every one of them, at a core level, is about creating or deploying new technologies to solve ongoing problems.
The American Rescue Plan deployed vaccines and widespread testing and genomic surveillance to stifle the pandemic; the infrastructure bill is thick with ideas to make broadband access universal and develop next-generation energy and transportation technologies; CHIPS is an effort to break our reliance on Taiwanese and South Korean semiconductor manufacturing and keep ahead of China in fields of the future like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; and the Inflation Reduction Act uses tax breaks and loan guarantees to supercharge the wind and solar industries, build up advanced battery manufacturing, develop cost-effective carbon capture systems, and give the auto and home-heating industries reasons to go entirely electric.
Institutional obstacles inhibit progress, to be sure, and Klein devotes word-count to describing them. But Beltway dialogue, especially on the right, focuses more on what things cost and too little on what we get, Klein suggests.
It’s cliché, at this point, for politicians to brandish charts showing the stunning rise in projected health spending over the next 40 or 75 years. But those charts have always bugged me. Doesn’t what we get for that spending matter? You tell me if we’re living healthy lives until age 175, and then I’ll tell you whether spending a hefty share of G.D.P. on medical care is a scandal or a bargain.
We hear endlessly from critics that there is no difference between the major parties. But I put it to you that Democrats are at least trying to solve problems and make lives better while the GOP has no agenda save for defending its shrinking political turf.
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